Organic reach has declined significantly over the past number of years, and with so many new brands popping up every day, reach looks set to continue its downward trend. But that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your own organic reach and get more interaction from your audience.

Increased reach means more eyes on your content and brand, as well as more opportunities to raise engagement and gain potential new fans and customers – in this post, I’ll give you some tips on how you can increase your organic reach for your business without spending a dollar on social media ads.

What is reach?

Reach is the number of people who see your posts. You’ll also hear about “potential reach”, which is the overall number of of people your content could potentially reach, normally used in association with paid advertising.

The ever tricky organic reach is not so tricky when you produce great content that your fans connect with.

With more brands joining the social media world, user feeds get saturated, making it a little harder to get your brand in front of existing followers, while making it even more impossible to get fresh eyes on your brand. It’s up to you to put your best content forward in the best way possible.

But what happens if you start to see a slump in your reach? Here are a few tips to help.

Use your Analytics

How will you know how far you’ve come without knowing where you are?

You need to take the time to measure where your account is and track how it performs from here on out. This way you can see where you stand now, get an idea of where you want to be, and set up benchmarks along the way. It’s also a great way to set some goals for your social growth and adjusting your content plan to reach those goals.

Facebook and Twitter have built in tools to help you keep track of your progress. Instagram will soon be rolling out native analytics as well, but you can use Iconsquare, in the mean time. Even manually tracking the success of your content can help you plan for future posts.

Trial and Error

There are three basic elements to each social media post: the content, the caption, and the time you post. Experiment with these 3 elements until you find a combination that works for your audience.

Post at different times: Sometimes you need to shake things up, time wise. Use audience insights to discover when concentrations of your audience are active. Test different times and gauge reactions. The more you test the better idea you will get of when its best to post to reach maximum engagement.

Use different content forms: Videos seem to be outdoing photos – but see what kind of content your audience responds to. Use text to ask questions, if text alone gets nothing re-word your question and post it with a photo to see if anything changes.

Vary caption lengths: Switch up the lengths of captions to see how your audience reacts to each.

Try different hashtags: Use hashtags – but not just any hashtags, hashtags that are relevant to your brand or content.

Experiment with your content and make sure you are measuring each post so you know what is working and not working with your audience.

Create Quality Content

Make sure your images and videos are not only of good quality, but share content that actually adds value to your follower’s lives (even if it’s just a laugh).

Social media is constantly changing, and so is your audience and their interests. You need stay on top of trends, continue measuring your performance, and keep tabs on your audience. Your social media presence will evolve as time goes on. Don’t be afraid to try to new things and to ask your audience for their help and opinions.